Martin Jahn (artist)

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Martin Jahn (born November 10, 1898 in Potsdam , † July 6, 1981 in Darmstadt ) was a German painter , draftsman and art teacher .

Career

Martin Jahn was the son of a Potsdam art locksmith who was also brought in to work on the wrought iron bars around the Berlin City Palace . After school he worked in a metalworking shop, then in a lithographic institute. From 1916 to 1919 he attended the State Art School in Berlin , which trained drawing teachers in the sense of naturalism , passed the state examination there and decided to continue his studies after his legal traineeship in Potsdam and Berlin at the Bauhaus Weimar founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius . He was accepted there in the winter semester of 1920.

Student at the Bauhaus Weimar

Martin Jahn completed his preliminary apprenticeship with Johannes Itten and was then trained in the metal workshop, which was successively under the artistic direction of Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy , and took up suggestions from Lyonel Feininger .

In 1923 he passed his journeyman's examination as a silversmith at the Weimar Chamber of Crafts. The illustration of his journeyman's piece, a bronze mocha pot, is included in every standard work on the Bauhaus. However, Jahn later never worked with metal again, instead devoting his artistic talent exclusively to painting and drawing. The bronze jug is now part of the collection of the Bauhaus Museum Berlin, as are a number of drawings that were made during Itten's preliminary apprenticeship. Jahn's outstanding talent for drawing was evident: in his admission semester, he was entrusted with the design of invitations to the inauguration of Haus Sommerfeld , the architect of which was Bauhaus director Walter Gropius . He judged Jahn in a “testimony” from 1925: “His talent was particularly on the artistic and, above all, the drawing side. This talent for drawing was so excellent that he partly helped the professors of the institute as an assistant. "

Martin Jahn later wrote about his time at the Bauhaus: “Published by the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, a kind of leaflet appeared with calls for artists. One of these calls was from Walter Gropius. He proclaimed that art was not teachable; that one can only learn the craft, and that art can only emerge from the craft in gifted moments. And when Gropius founded a school in Weimar that paid homage to the principle that craft must be the foundation of training and I also learned that the painter Lyonel Feininger was a 'master' at this school, it was decided for me Thing that I went to Weimar after taking my art teacher exam and my traineeship. This school was called the 'State Bauhaus'. I went to Weimar to get in touch with Feininger; but at the Bauhaus you couldn't choose the teacher you felt most attracted to. Learning a trade was the basis of the Bauhaus; and so one only had the freedom of choosing a workshop. Each workshop had a foreman who was responsible for training in the craftsmanship. However, each workshop also had a form master who advised the 'Bauhauslers' on the artistic design of the work. These form masters changed from time to time. While I was working in the metal workshop, the workshop was subordinate to Itten, Klee and László Moholy-Nagy. (...) But a lot has changed over time, including at the Bauhaus. I felt more and more that my real place was not the metal workshop, but the drawing table. (...) I drew the conclusions and left the Bauhaus in 1924. "

Life and artistic work after 1924

From 1924 Martin Jahn taught art at grammar schools in Thuringia: briefly in Arnstadt, from 1924 to 1930 in Weida (1928 marriage to Mathilde Schlafke, 1929 birth of daughter Judith, later Apel), from 1930 to 1947 in Saalfeld (1936 birth of son Jörg-Wolfgang ) - with an interruption due to his work at the German School in Rome. In 1948 Martin Jahn moved to the Ruhr area and earned his living as a crane operator until he was able to reunite his family in Gummersbach. Here he worked as an art teacher at the municipal boys' high school until his retirement in 1963. He was a co-founder of the community of Oberbergischer Künstler, lecturer at the adult education center and participated in many exhibitions. In 1962 he designed a stained glass window with the title “The Mourners” for the grammar school - as a memorial for the fallen students. In 1974 Martin Jahn moved with his wife to Darmstadt, where he died in 1981.

In addition to his work as an art teacher, Jahn has created an extensive range of paintings and drawings. “Of the works that were created during his activity as an art teacher and during stays abroad, (...) most of them disappeared, if not destroyed, after the artist moved to the west of Thuringia. The rescued works (...) testify to the figurative and objective capture of the motifs and a design in the tradition of expressionism as well as the new objectivity. Martin Jahn first took the freedom to abstract visual manifestations in the West. In his compositions he builds up tense opposites and keeps them in balance, supported by a virtuoso drawing that enables diverse expression. In the design approach after 1950, traces of his training at the Bauhaus are just as recognizable as those of the informal and constructive currents of the time. "

“From 1974 Jahn turned to drawing with graphite and found completely new ways. The drawings are initially shaped by Jahn's typical, macabre-cheeky humor, fun in detail and an occasional critical look at the aesthetics of his surroundings. The result is a style that could be described as 'bizarre surrealism'. In the first phase, Jahn creates scenes of his surroundings with cynical-critical humor under the sign of the 'ecological crisis'. Ruins or blocks of flats can be seen here, an old, forgotten doll lies in tatters among the rubble. A scrap of an earlier advertisement sticks to a desolate concrete wall, surrounded by destroyed nature. In a large series that follows, Jahn enjoys using the language of his sophisticated drawing style, which goes even into the bizarre, to track down the transience of small things; There he discovers the fine structures of their remains: you can see dried up flowers, remains of bones, gnarled, old grape stalks, a crooked nail in the wall with a piece of torn thread still hanging from it, or stones that become megaliths by being Touching the seemingly realistic structure fills the entire picture surface. It is quite obvious that the aging artist, with humor on the one hand and wistful awe on the other, grapples with the transience of life. But the most impressive, but harrowing subjects are dead, soulless landscapes, in which unidentifiable, bizarre remnants of long past life extend to the horizon, bordered by a sky that will remain dark for all eternity. One thing is characteristic of the drawings of the last creative years: Jahn is increasingly detaching objects from their context and thus their meaning. They emerge like strange beings from a dark background. In his very last pictures he then takes this alienation to extremes: Here, he is no longer concerned with the objects themselves, but only with their completely isolated structure. If one understands abstraction in the broad sense as the release of the essential from the contingent, then one can say that Martin Jahn found his own way to abstraction with these pictures. Only forms of finely drawn structures can be seen. "

Art teacher Martin Jahn

A former pupil remembers Martin Jahn's art class in a middle school class at the Städtischen Jungs-Gymnasium (later Gymnasium Moltkestrasse, today Lindengymnasium ) in Gummersbach at the end of the 1950s: “Martin Jahn was rather short in stature, gaunt and had a sharp, pale color Face with deep creases in the mouth. He always wore a white coat to class. His movements were quick, sometimes jittery. The latter was deceptive, as you could tell when you saw him draw, for example when he was correcting a student's work. Then he just threw precisely fitting lines on the paper, it was fascinating. But he never 'mapped out' anything. We shouldn't imitate anything, but rather produce our own. He taught the techniques - as far as the meager equipment and our more or less limited talent or interest allowed. Even then, the subject was called 'art'. Years later he wrote in a letter: “(...) you even address me as an 'artist'. You know, in certain respects I am very unfashionable and agree with Philipp Otto Runge that only vain or stupid people can call themselves 'artists'. And in a slight modification of a saying by Dürer: 'And what art is, I don't know!' ”The artist Martin Jahn may have suppressed some sarcastic remarks about 'art' in school. In sarcastic remarks he was just as apt as in drawing. When, due to a mishap on the watercolor theme of 'gray houses', red paint ran into the background sky and, in order to save the work, fantasized about an evening blast furnace tap, he rejected this 'expressionistic' suggestion. When we enriched the sky with flying birds in the well-known sloppy V-shape, he made us aware that there were 'ciphers' among would-be painters that only existed because their meaning had been agreed upon. That relieves the painter of having to look closely at a flying bird. And he stood in front of the blackboard with his back to it and demonstrated the rational production of such bird ciphers. He also became sarcastic with certain motifs that had become simply impossible due to all too frequent repetition, "when there are: sunrises, sunsets ..." He never tire of asking for a closer look. 'Gray houses': 'There is no such thing as gray!' - He demanded accuracy in every respect, including the motif. The skipper at the tiller had to sit so that he could actually steer the boat. He chose tasks in such a way that they and the techniques to be used enabled success even for those students who had long since given up on the subject. For one of the first exercises we had to draw an eraser in an oblique view, with a sensual, fat-black pen. A manageable thing, from which one could learn a lot, and which was, as it were, foolproof: Even in the poorest result, one recognized the subject. Schoolchildren, convinced of themselves, 'I can't paint', enjoyed the subject for the first time. Teaching to see and not overwhelming; Start modestly and yet help achieve success: that seems to have been Martin Jahn's didactic principle. He had a box with all sorts of worthless material: frayed twine, tree bark, coarse, bent, rusty nails, weathered wooden blocks. What made each of these things stand out was a distinct, distinctive structure and texture. Each was worth drawing study, and that was what it was for. So it became clear that a string is more than a winding line on the drawing sheet. That wood as such can also be made recognizable in a pencil drawing (it didn't have to be 'brown'). That it can be identified even without a picture context (without being a beam of a house). Jahn was not satisfied with taking the 'ciphers' from us, but showed us the means to do without them. - But the motifs had nothing representative. No finished works of art were made in art class. The enormously modest Martin Jahn had nothing of the presumptuous artist attitude or the attitude of the 'misunderstood artist'. He was certainly misunderstood in his surroundings, where even the 'educated' hardly knew anything about the Bauhaus, let alone who Jahn's teacher had been there. In the fifties, some teachers still had a clerical tone when dealing with students. Jahn embodied a different Prussia. He was an advertiser for the sparse and for the precise, someone who understood humility as great. The sparseness of his motifs was probably not just didactic. His own work shows that he was fascinated by apparently undemanding things such as tree bark. At that time he revealed more about himself in class than his students could have suspected. "

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas , high school graduate in 1949 at the same grammar school, remembers in the following reminiscence about the art lessons with Martin Jahn: “During my school days, the key to modernity was the visual arts, especially painting. I owed my education in classical modernism to the fortunate circumstance that our drawing teacher Martin Jahn, who painted himself, was of the opinion that he had unfortunately taken our class too late two years before the Abitur to do something sensible with us, that is Practice drawing. Therefore we would have to be content with the replacement workload of an art historical overview of modern painting. In fact, he was very good at that too. Before us he worked out the differentiated network of a modern age beginning with Courbet and Corot, encouraging me to do a work on Job von Barlach . Jahn also introduced us to the Bauhaus, which he himself had once worked on. Architecture and industrial design were 'applied' but 'constructive' forms of expression that - similar to drama literature - particularly attracted me. In the longer term, I was more interested in the experimental and the Constructivist line of painting in painting than the enthusiasm for German Expressionism initially suggested. Not bad preparation for Adorno's posthumous aesthetic theory. "

Exhibitions from 1976

  • 1976 Darmstadt, art workshop (drawings)
  • 1978 Darmstadt, Kunstverein , Kunsthalle (drawings; with Edward Mayer and Fritz Vahle )
  • 1982 Berlin, Bauhaus Archive ("Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus", participation)
  • 1983 Darmstadt, Saalbau-Galerie (drawings)
  • 1992 Remchingen -Nöttingen, old parish hall ("Landscapes")
  • 1993 Saalfeld / Saale , local history museum in the Franciscan monastery ("Painting and Graphics")
  • 1994 Gummersbach , Town Hall (painting)
  • 1998 Tübingen , Galerie Veronika Burger, Galerie am Hausthof ("On the 100th birthday of Martin Jahn, drawings, gouaches, collages")
  • 1998 Bad Saulgau , Städtische Galerie Fähre , "For the 100th birthday - painting and drawings"
  • 2004 Wiesbaden , Art in Practice (Drawings)
  • 2005 Melbu (Norway), Hadsel Kunstforening
  • 2012 London, Barbican Art Gallery ("Bauhaus: Art as Life", participation)
  • 2014 Kassel , Music Academy "Louis Spohr" ("Contrasts", painting and drawings)
  • 2016 Weida, Osterburg , gallery in the old castle ("Martin Jahn - drawings and gouaches from five decades")
  • 2018 Potsdam , Urania ("100 years of Bauhaus: Martin Jahn - a Potsdam 'Bauhausler' from the very beginning")
  • 2019 Gummersbach, Town Hall ("A Bauhausler in Gummersbach", oil paintings, watercolors and drawings)
  • 2019 Arnstadt , Neues Palais, Castle Museum ("100 years of Bauhaus. Martin Jahn and Arnstadt", selected works)
  • 2019 Bernau near Berlin , Galerie Bernau (double exhibition " Christa Jeitner - Martin Jahn")

Receipts and further information

Literature about Martin Jahn

  • H.-G. Sperlich: Martin Jahn , exhibition catalog (Darmstadt 1978).
  • Wolfgang Wangler: Bauhaus - 2nd Generation , publisher of the Symbol magazine (Cologne 1980), pp. 28–33.
  • Klaus Weber (ed.): Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus , exhibition catalog Verlag Kupfergraben Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (Berlin 1992), pp. 212–215.
  • Veronika Burger: Martin Jahn: Rediscovered, Newly Seen , exhibition catalog (Tübingen 1998).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Veronika Burger: Martin Jahn: rediscovered, newly seen , see literature.
  2. ↑ Dorothea Apel.
  3. ↑ Hans Dietrich Dammann, 2013.
  4. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: My high school days. Excerpts from a planned biography , see web links.
  5. ^ Data record in the catalog of the German National Library (as of May 2, 2015).
  6. ^ Paintings and drawings by Martin Jahn in the exhibition archive of Galerie Veronika Burger, see web links.
  7. ^ Bauhaus: Art as Life ( Memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). Press release in the Barbican Newsroom.
  8. ↑ Diversity of ideas in the new program of events at the Music Academy . Press release of the City of Kassel from February 23, 2015 on www.kassel.de (PDF file, as of December 25, 2018).
  9. ↑ Annual review 2016 on www.weida.de and event information on www.facebook.com (as of January 25, 2017).
  10. ↑ Invitation to the vernissage on www.urania-potsdam.de and discussion on www.maz-online.de (as of December 24, 2018).
  11. ↑ Press release on www.presse-service.de, article on www.rundschau-online.de (as of April 6, 2019).
  12. ↑ Advance notice at www.bauhaus100.de (as of April 6, 2019).
  13. ↑ Advance notice at www.galerie-bernau.de (as of November 19, 2019).
personal data
SURNAME Jahn, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, draftsman and art teacher
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Potsdam
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1981
Place of death Darmstadt